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Amnesty International

IRAN- EXECUTION TOLL OVER 4,400 MANY SHOT IN SECRET JULY 1982

Amnesty International

June 30, 1982

Report

Amnesty international newsletter

The number of people officially announced to
have been executed in Iran
since the revolution of February 1979 is now well over 4,400 but reports
reaching AI indicate that many more people have been put
to death in executions which have not been made public by the authorities.

A total of 165 secret executions are reported
to have been carried out in Tehran's
Evin Prison on 12 and 26 March 1982
according to statement on 15 May by the Paris
office of the People Mujahedin Organization of Iran.
Among those reportedly executed were Amir Siavosh, a university student and Golamreza
Safari. The 75 people reported to have been executed on 12 March are said to
have been given a week to express repentance on television or face execution.

The French newspaper Le Matin
referred on 2 April to reports of some 800 executions between 1 and 11 February 1982 which had reached
the newspaper from Iranian prisons. It described its sources as "totally
independent of political channels" However Le Matin
added that "Such figures cannot be openly investigated, for executions are
no longer announced."

Although it is impossible for AI to confirm
these figures, accounts from other sources including members of the Baha'i
faith and a group of exiled Iranian lawyers, the "Comite
independant des avocats iraniens en exil" confirm
that people are being executed secretly in Iran
and that in many cases the families are not informed until well after the
execution.

Many executions appear to have taken place
without trial or when no death sentence has been passed:

Omid Gharib, a
former student in France,
was arrested on 9 June 1980
after a letter of his to a friend in France
had been intercepted by the authorities. His indictment stated that he had been
"westernized, brought up in a westernized family... had been too long in
Europe for his studies... smoked Winston cigarettes and ... displayed a
tendency to the left." At his trial he was sentenced to three years
imprisonment but on 2 February 1982
his parents learned that he was executed two days earlier.

Ebrahim Eshghani is reported to have been secretly executed in
November 1981 in Chah Bahar
Prison in Baluchistan after
having been sentenced to life imprisonment.

AI is still seeking information about 11
Baha'is who were arrested in August 1980 and have not been seen or heard of
since. Ninteen Baha'is have
been executed in Iran
during 1982, bringing the total number of adherents executed since the 1979
revolution to more than 100.